How To Be a Cloud Mogul(l) – Our 2014 RSA “Dueling Banjos/Cloud/DevOps” Talk

Rich Mogull (Securosis) and I have given a standing set of talks over the last 5-6 years at the RSA Security Conference that focus on innovation, disruption and ultimately making security practitioners more relevant in the face of all this churn.

We’ve always offered practical peeks of what’s coming and what folks can do to prepare.

This year, we (I should say mostly Rich) built a bunch of Ruby code that leveraged stuff running in Amazon Web Services (and using other Cloud services) to show how security folks with little “coding” capabilities could build and deploy this themselves.

Specifically, this talk was about SecDevOps — using principles that allow for automated and elastic cloud services to do interesting security things that can be leveraged in public and private clouds using Chef and other assorted mechanisms.

I also built a bunch of stuff using the RackSpace Private Cloud stack and Chef, but didn’t have the wherewithal or time to demonstrate it — and doing live demos over a tethered iPad connection to AWS meant that if it sucked, it was Rich’s fault.

You can find the presentation here (it clearly doesn’t include the live demos):